Thursday, June 29, 2017

Is Sky TV's golden era coming to an end?

(A slightly abbreviated version of this column was first published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail on June 28.)

I’m feeling very on-trend at
the moment, to use a fashionable expression.

I recently watched series one
of the TV drama Twin Peaks for the
first time. It originally screened on American television in 1990.

Okay, so it took me a while
to get around to seeing it. Geoffrey Palmer was prime minister when it was made
and Mikhail Gorbachev was in charge of the Soviet Union. But hey, you can’t
rush into these things.

I now feel I’ve eliminated an
embarrassing deficit in my cultural education, because Twin Peaks is one of those programmes that everyone who professes
to be even vaguely hip has seen so many times that they can mouth the script in
sync with the actors.

It’s commonly described as a
cult series, which is usually a polite way of saying that a handful of arty critics
raved but it was a commercial flop.

In fact series one was a
ratings success. According to Wikipedia, it’s commonly ranked – in America,
anyway – as one of the 50 greatest TV dramas of all time. It was only when the
producers tried to stretch an already thin plot into a second series that it
failed.

Twin Peaks
is ostensibly a murder mystery, but to use that description is like saying Moby-Dick is a story about a fishing
trip. The programme’s appeal hinges not on its storyline but on deliciously quirky
characters and surreal situations.

For the 50-minute running
time of each episode, you basically enter an alternative universe – the
fictional logging town of Twin Peaks in Washington State – where almost everyone
is seriously weird and nothing makes much sense.

The hunt for a sex killer
soon becomes almost incidental as the series veers into a soap opera-style
exploration of the convoluted lives and relationships of the town’s
inhabitants. For all that, it’s strangely – you might almost say hypnotically –
riveting.

Alas for the producers,
quirky characters and surreal situations can get you only so far. By series two
the weaknesses in the meandering plot were becoming all too obvious. I
gave it away after just two episodes.

I see that a third series
recently premiered in the United States, 27 years after the first. It includes
several of the original cast members. One critic described it as “weird and
creepy and slow”. So… not much has changed, then.

Why am I writing about Twin Peaks? Simply because the fact that
I was able to watch it on demand, streaming it on my “smart” TV nearly three
decades after it was first screened, illustrates the revolutionary changes in
our TV viewing patterns.

Historically, television
viewing in New Zealand can be roughly divided into three phases.

For the first 15 years, from
1960-1975, we watched one state-owned channel. Television then was a great
social unifier, because everyone watched the same programmes – Peyton Place, Bonanza, Coronation Street,
The Dick Van Dyke Show, Studio One, Star Trek – and talked about them the next day.

Even when a second channel
was introduced, it was still state-owned. There was more choice but the diet
remained essentially the same.

It wasn’t until broadcasting
was deregulated by the Labour government in 1989 that a private competitor,
TV3, entered the market. But the real game-changer was the arrival of pay
television with the launch in 1990 of Sky TV.

Sky TV was a perfect example
of what is now known as a disrupter, using technology and a new business model
to lure viewers away from the traditional free-to-air channels.

Its arrival heralded the end of television as an agent of social cohesion, because viewers were now
presented with a wide range of viewing options. The days when virtually the
entire population watched the same programmes were gone.

Crucial to Sky’s strategy was
the acquisition of monopoly rights to screen major sporting events – a licence
to print money in a sports-mad country. In this Sky was spectacularly
successful, enabling it to become a dominant player in television – this,
despite the company making virtually no contribution to the production of
domestic programmes other than live sport.

Sky’s control of sport
signalled the death of the egalitarian ethos by which all New Zealanders could
share in the triumphs and disappointments of the country’s major teams.

There were now two New
Zealands – the one that paid to watch the All Blacks or the Black Caps on Sky,
and the rest. People without Sky no
longer feel the same engagement with national teams because they don’t get to see
them play. I could trip over Sam Cane or Ryan Crotty in the street tomorrow and
not recognise them.

But perhaps Sky’s golden run is
coming to an end, because an even more potent disrupter has entered the market.
I watched Twin Peaks on Lightbox and immediately
before that I enjoyed Fargo – the TV
series, not the movie – on Netflix.

I can stream television
programmes using these services at whatever time of day I like and there are no
commercial interruptions. Streaming elevates freedom of choice to a whole new
level, and suddenly Sky TV is looking very much like yesterday’s technology.
How very sad.

Sky still controls major
sport, of course, and showed its arrogance and greed on Saturday night by broadcasting
a commercial when we should have heard the British national anthem before the
Eden Park rugby test.

I will dance on Sky’s grave,
metaphorically speaking, if and when it loses its stranglehold. It would be poetic justice if it was brought
down by the same process of technological disruption that enabled it to thrive
in the first place.

FOOTNOTE: Alert readers will notice an error in this column. I was wrong about Sky playing a commercial over the "British national anthem" before Saturday night's rugby test. A moment's thought would have told me they couldn't play God Save the Queen with Irishmen in the Lions side. Several commenters on Stuff certainly let me know about my mistake. I've left it in as a lesson to myself to be more careful in future.

3 comments:

Hi Karl,Completely off-topic but I’d really enjoyed reading your book “A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis”.

I’d never heard of most of the songs you’d listed (pardon my ignorance: my general music knowledge is really poor) but the info on the songwriters and singers, the impact of the songs on American music at the time, and your descriptions of the towns and ways of life in the different regions was fascinating.

I did many google searches to hear the songs mentioned in your book so it had prompted an interesting little music education for me.

Thanks John. It's extremely gratifying to get comments like yours. Especially pleasing to hear you enjoyed the book even though you don't sound like a music buff. Volume II remains just an idea at this stage. I have a list of songs and places - I'm just waiting to summon the energy to hit the road again.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.